Hive Health

Over my morning cup of tea I had a quick read of the latest tweets on the HIVE feed. One of the tweets mentioned a medicine and social media course… well that looks interesting I thought and with a quick click I started learning all about a site called Webicina.

Webicina.com is a free service that provides curated medical social media resources in over 80 medical topics in 17 languages. Their mission is to let empowered patients and medical professionals access the most relevant social media content in their own languages on a customizable platform. So how does it work? Well you simply select your condition and the form of social media you’re interested in – news, blogs, podcasts, videos, twitter feeds, etc. – and Webicina gives you a nice little list of everything available on those platforms. Currently the site covers a range of medical conditions from acne to arthritis and cancer to epilepsy. Amazing. They obviously have this whole social media and healthcare thing wrapped up.

This brings us back to course they’re running: The Social MEDia course, the idea being that “digital literacy must be in the medical curriculum globally”. The course was launched two weeks ago; it’s online and Prezi-based, with tests and gamification. The best part? It’s free!

On the site there is also a list of interesting presentations on topics such as health search engines, e-patients, medical blogging and virtual worlds. You could spend the whole day on there and still come back for more.

Have a look for yourself at www.webicina.com and www.thecourse.webicina.com/

Scoop.it, a tool that lets one and all hunt, gather and distribute content from around the Web launched publicly today after a year in an invite-only beta.

We were lucky enough to be one of the beta babes and we have been curating Patient Centricity News for a couple of months now.  Its dead straightforward, and is backed by a plum algorithm that once seduced helps you find relevant articles and videos. It cracked the automated pitfalls of death by junk content by leaving the curator to choose what’s right for them, and its this for me that has made the Scoop.it experience so fresh.

As “curation” becomes the next buzz word it been a joy to be part of the big beta crowd.  With more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month, we look forward to reviewing load more healthcare comms publications.

Our Luke pinged me this.  Tight scriptwriting, great acting and a relevant story.

I saw a great candidate last night for a first round interview. Watching this made me think that alongside the CV, interview notes and discussions with people in the know, we are increasingly assessing candidates by who they are online. In the old days we might do a quick university phone around, or chat to someone whose experience had crossed with the candidate’s CV. Later this moved to  a quick Facebook check to see whether the candidate was fun, and you know, well, sociable.

These days we pretty much audit a future one of us online. In days gone by this was prorata by seniority; the bigger the kid the more we would expect but now it’s an even assessment regardless of level. A slot in the diary figuring out who we have in common, what they have worked on, whether we cross over on an occasional dragon and their day to day social media interaction and level of connectedness

This film asks the question whether that is fair, whether its important to know whether a colleagues has a penchant for spending most of their free time drunk in fountains (you know who you are). O

This week has been spent consuming the digital outputs from Digipharm and the PM Society Digital Media Awards.

Most of the team have been at Digipharm, coming back with lessons, learnings and frustrations. I have been engrossed in reflective discussion and ploughing through slide shares.

Digipharm presented rather an interesting paradox. Almost all the speakers were advocates and users of social media – be that Twitter, blogs, Facebook or Slideshare. By it’s very nature, getting stuck into social media in the spheres and groups of interest to each of us gives us great transparency to the views of others with the same interests. As such, those people close to the social media outputs of the speakers over the last year will have already been familiar with much of what they had to say. It does beg the question – if you believe in the strength of social media, is it really appropriate to hold an offline conference to persuade of it’s power?

Fascinating too, that most of the presentations are compiled and repurposed blogs in a presentation format. Is it too much to hope for these digital specialists to understand that all channels require us to optimise our delivery and message to suit them? Isn’t there an irony in taking lessons from another powerpoint slide purveyor on the importance of utilising digital effectively? That just delivering content is not enough – you need to screw everything you can out of the environmental possibilities of the channel. Use the conference opportunity, enable the debate, force group work or even, heavens above, facilitate live innovation. Where’s the problem solving? Where’s the experience?  Where’s the ‘practice what you preach’?

Beyond the appropriateness of the style, is is reasonable to assume that whilst we just talk to ourselves we should expect to achieve anything more than incremental improvement? For two days, digital pharma spoke to digital pharma, partly about how behind digital pharma (still) is. As an industry, how can we expect to learn from and catch up with other industries if we only talk amongst ourselves? Conferences like this should be pulling in seriously capable talent from outside our arena, allowing us to see bleeding edge digital work from the whole space, not just an inward look at our keen but clearly toddling sector.

But regardless of who they are, whilst people are up on stage. A small wish for next year would be to rise above the speaker-bashing-by-tweet mid presentation. It’s Prickville. Why not go the whole hog and draw a cock and balls on the blackboard? These are too important times to allow the Twitter tits to lowest-common-denominator-heckle. If you disagree, or are bored, then grow some nuts and get involved. Or sit still and behave – the usual rules of polite convention apply. Don’t hide behind the little blue bird – its anonymity is not an excuse for a lack of respect.

I have seen digital communities develop in the hospitality sector for years now, as part of a team running what the guardian considered to be one the UKs top 5 pop up restaurants. It’s really interesting to watch this grass roots digitally enabled community grow and develop, and contrast it to our world. In the pop up restaurant world the early days saw a few leaders act and encourage, keen to co-create, eager to share, but most of all drag everyone in, regardless. Those that did, shared. Self imposed authority was questioned, ego was mocked, and the community self-policed, valuing development of the movement over sales, fame and self promotion. It felt almost liberal. In the healthcare world that community is a punch line, a sound bite. Is the community thats discussed in digital health really a collection of the self interested? I think we should take a good hard look and fear becoming at most a collusion for profit, at least egomania united in sycophancy.

Alongside our visit to the conference, we have been involved in the judging, entries and ceremony of the PM Digital Awards, picking up 5 across the group last night.

The awards have provided us with view of what is seen as worthwhile, what’s valued. ROI is front of mind and look and feel is pretty central. Would it be healthy to seek an evolution to the night – seems fitting for digital surely? Both the ‘established’ format and traditional black tie event are crying out for change. It left me reaching for some interactivity, some alternative approach that differentiated the space we are in.

Most importantly, surely we should demand that these digital events challenge our expectation. I hope we strive to avoid corporate safety, for the benefit of the digital community and look to other areas to really engender change and progression.